REMEMBERING THE VETERAN
DISABILITY, TRAUMA, AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, 1861-1915
Erin R. Corrales-Diaz
A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department
of Art.
Chapel Hill 2016
Approved by: Ross Barrett
Bernard L. Herman John P. Bowles John Kasson
ii © 2016
iii ABSTRACT
Erin R. Corrales-Diaz: Remembering the Veteran: Disability, Trauma, and the American Civil War, 1861-1915
(Under the direction of Ross Barrett)
My dissertation, “Remembering the Veteran: Disability, Trauma, and the American Civil War, 1861-1915,” explores the complex ways that American artists interpreted war-induced disability after the Civil War. Examining pictorial representations of disabled veterans by George Inness, Thomas Nast, William Bell, and other artists, I argue that the veteran’s broken body became a vehicle for exploring the overwhelming sense of loss that Northerners and Southerners experienced in the war's aftermath. Oscillating between aestheticized ideals and the reality of affliction, visual representations of disabled veterans uncover postwar Americans’ deep and otherwise unspoken anxieties about masculinity, identity, and nationhood. This project represents the first major effort to historicize the visual culture of war-related disability and presents a significant deviation from previous Civil War scholarship and its focus on death. In examining these understudied representations of disability and tracing out the ways that they rework and reinforce nineteenth-century constructions of the body, this project models an
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I cannot express enough thanks to my advisor, Dr. Ross Barrett. Dr. Barrett guided me through what seemed at times to be an insurmountable task. His insight, generosity, and support have made this project a successful one. I would also like to thank the rest of my committee members: Drs. John P. Bowles, Bernard L. Herman, John Kasson, and Eleanor Jones Harvey. Dr. Bowles’ sharp insights regarding race and disability focused my interpretation of the images of disabled African American Civil War veterans. And his eternal optimism was always much appreciated. I could always count on Dr. Herman for engaging and intellectually stimulating conversations, the results of which are manifested in this dissertation. It was during Dr. Kasson’s course “Bodies on Display,” taken during my first semester at the University of North Carolina in the fall of 2010, that I began to delve deeply into the topic of disabled Civil War veterans. I had the good fortune to receive a dissertation fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum where I met Dr. Eleanor Jones Harvey. Her wealth of knowledge about the American Civil War and enthusiasm for my project encouraged me to see American art history in a new light.
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scholar of disabled Civil War veterans, Ansley Herring Wegner. A Jacob M. Price Visiting Research Fellowship allowed me to dig deeply into the collections at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan. Many thanks go to Clayton Lewis for his tireless efforts. A Rockwell Center Dissertation Fellowship enabled me to take a trip to Richmond, Virginia, and unearth material on Confederate disabled veterans at the Library of Virginia, the Historical Society of Virginia, the Richmond Historical Society, and the Museum of the Confederacy. Before this dissertation was completed, Dr. Joyce Schiller, the Norman Rockwell Museum’s first curator of the Rockwell Center for American Studies, passed away. Although we never had the opportunity to meet in person, I believe she would be pleased to know how much her
institution’s generosity shaped this project. A Frank Hideo Kono Fellowship at the Huntington Library brought me into contact with a fellow enthusiast of ephemera, David Mihaly. The receipt of a Francis A. Countway Library Fellowship for the History of Medicine allowed me to spend two weeks researching Civil War medicine at Harvard’s Countway Medical Library; special thanks goes to Dr. Scott Podolsky, Jack Eckert, and Dominic Hall.
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Collection. Many thanks to Jeanne Solensky for assisting me in navigating such an immense amount of material. A Swann Foundation Fellowship funded a two-week research trip at the Library of Congress. Particular thanks go to Martha Kennedy and Eric P. Frazier. I was grateful to spend another year with Dr. Melissa Dabakis as a Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation Fellow at Kenyon College. I extend thanks to my Kenyon colleagues: Dr. Austin Porter, Dr. Eugene Dwyer, Dr. Sarah Blick, Dr. Theodore Mason, Dan Younger, Marcella Hackbardt, and Elizabeth Williams-Clymer. I would also like to thank the students of my ARHS 391 class: Alivia Bloch, Madison Breschi, Chloe Friedman, Gavin Mead, Julia Plottel, Julia Richards, Rachel Sweeney, Jack Washburn, and Julia Weaver.
Several other scholars were influential in shaping this dissertation: Dr. Timothy Marr, Dr. Joshua Brown, Dr. Louis P. Masur, Michael Rhode, Dr. Janice Simon, Dr. Sarah Rieder Ipeson, Dr. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, and Dr. David Lubin. Particular thanks go to Dr. Leo G. Mazow for providing comments on several chapter drafts and being my cheerleader. Several of my
classmates at the University of North Carolina read chapter drafts and helped work through research conundrums: Adam Domby, Jennifer Kosmin, Josh Lynn, Sarah Blythe, and Kim Bobier. I especially want to thank Johanna Gohmann and Klint Ericson. During the final stretch, my Johnson Collection colleagues (Sarah Tignor, Lynne Blackman, Holly Watters, Aimee Wise, and David Henderson) pushed me to the finish line. I would also like to thank Susu and George Johnson for their encouragement while I put the last touches on my dissertation.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures……….…….x
INTRODUCTION…………..……….1
CHAPTER 1: VISUALIZING THE “REAL WAR”: THE U.S. ARMY SURGEON GENERAL’S OFFICE AND CIVIL WAR SUFFERING………..………..30
“An Enduring Monument”………...………...34
“A Bureau of Art”………...………...35
Ars Medica……….37
Metonymical Flesh……….43
Mnemonic Bones………...46
Inscribing the Disabled Body……….52
Preforming (Gendered) Pain………..55
“The Human Wheel”………..64
Severed, Suffered, and Sacrificed………..67
CHAPTER 2: VANISHING VETERANS: PICTORIAL HAUNTING, METAPHYSICAL TRAUMA, AND THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION………..78
Inness’s Limits of Realism………..………..82
Labor and Land………..91
A Southern Gothic: Haunted Ruins and Spectral Bodies………..97
Irritable Hearts, Nostalgia, and the Spiritual Divide………103
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CHAPTER 3: EMPTY SLEEVES AND BLOODY SHIRTS:
DISABLED CIVIL WAR VETERANS AND PRESIDENTIAL
CAMPAIGNS, 1864-1880………...114
Stumping and Dismemberment: Disability and Antebellum Political Cartoons……….117
“A House Divided”: The 1864 Presidential Campaign………...121
“Enough to Vote”: Political Struggles of Disable African American Veterans………..129
“Vote as You Shot”: Reconstruction and the 1872 Election………...136
The Hero of Gettysburg and the 1880 Election………...144
CHAPTER 4: PAPER MEMORIES: MASS MEDIA AND COMMERICIALIZED CIVIL WAR HISTORY………151
The Northern Madonna: Reproducing the Empty Sleeve………154
Imprinting Disability: William Ludwell Sheppard and Confederate Memory…………165
Decorating the Intersectional Body: Garfield Thomas Haywood and Disabled Black Veterans………...173
Conclusion………...164
CONCLUSION...190
FIGURES…….………197
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1.1 - Winslow Homer, “Our Watering Places—The Empty Sleeve
at Newport,” Harper’s Weekly, August 26, 1865………...…….197 Figure 1.2 - Dr. Reed Bontecou, “Lewis Martin,” ca. 1863-1865………...197 Figure 1.3 - J.T. Zealy, “Jem, Gullah, belonging to F.N. Green,” March 1850………..198 Figure 1.4 - Anonymous, “Unidentified African American soldier,” ca. 1863-1865…………..198 Figure 1.5 - Dario Robleto, A Defeated Soldier Wishes to Walk His
Daughter Down the Wedding Aisle, 2004………...199 Figure 1.6 - Timothy O’Sullivan, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July 1863, 1865………….199 Figure 1.7 - Postcard of William Rudolf O’Donovan……….…….200 Figure 1.8 - John Rogers, Wounded to the Rear, One More Shot, patented 1865………...200 Figure 1.9 - John Rogers, The Wounded Scout, A Friend in the Swamp, patented 1864………201 Figure 1.10 - “The Art of Inspiring Courage,” Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun,
October 1863………201 Figure 2.1 - Alfred Kappes, “The Main Hall of the Army Medical Museum
—Washington,” 1874………..202 Figure 2.2 - Herman Faber, Packard’s Successful Re-Amputation at the Hip Joint, 1867…….202 Figure 2.3 - Attributed to Guido Reni, Beatrice Cenci, ca. 1662………203 Figure 2.4 - Exterior of Ford’s Theatre Building, ca. 1866-1877………...203 Figure 2.5 - Edward Stauch, “Shell Wound of Left Parietal Bone” and
“Foot Wound,” 1864………204 Figure 2.6 - Augustus Pohlers, “Fracture of Forearm,” 1862………..204 Figure 2.7 - Edward Stauch, “Hospital Gangrene of an Arm Stump,” ….………..205 Figure 2.8 - Edward Stauch, “Hospital Gangrene of an Arm Stump” (Drawing)…...………....205 Figure 2.9 - Edward Stauch, “Hospital Gangrene of an Arm Stump,” (Watercolor)…………..206 Figure 2.10 - Julius Bien after Edward Stauch, “Hospital Gangrene
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Figure 2.11 - John Singleton Copley, Anatomy Book, Plate VII, 1756………...207
Figure 2.12 - Claude Bernard and Charles Huette, Précis iconographique de médecine opératoire et d'anatomie, 1856………...………207
Figure 2.13 - Jean Baptiste Marc Bourgery and Nicolas-Henri Jacob, Traité complet de l’anatomie de l’homme, comprenant la medecine opératoire, 1832-1854………...…..208
Figure 2.14 - Joseph Pancoast, A Treatise on Operative Surgery: A Description of the Various Processes of the Art, 1844……….………...208
Figure 2.15 - Stephen Smith, Handbook of Surgical Operations, 1862………..209
Figure 2.16 - Julian J. Chisolm, A Manual of Military Surgery: Prepared for Use in the Confederate Army, 1863……….……..209
Figure 2.17 - Charles Le Brun, “Le Ravissement,” Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions, 1698………..………...210
Figure 2.18 - Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, 1617………....210
Figure 2.19 - Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece, 1512-1516………..211
Figure 2.20 - Edward Stauch, “Leg Wound, Amputation at the Hip,” 1863………...211
Figure 2.21 - Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Steak, 1817………..…….212
Figure 2.22 – Dr. Reed Bontecou, Field Day, ca. 1861-1865……….………....212
Figure 2.23 - The first home of the Museum, 1862-1863……….………...213
Figure 2.24 - H.H. Nichols, The third home of the Museum, on H Street in Washington, D.C., ca.1863……….……….….213
Figure 2.25 - Main exhibit hall of the Army Medical Museum in Ford's Theatre building, ca. 1870s………...………214
Figure 2.26 - Charles L. Cummings, The Great War Relic, 1870s………..214
Figure 2.27 - Specimen 1148 and Stauch’s illustration of James E. Kelly…...….………..215
Figure 2.28 - Specimen 710A………...………...215
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Figure 2.30 - “Charles McCurnell”………...……….…..216
Figure 2.31 - To the Surgeon, ca. 1861-1865………..217
Figure 2.32 - Alfred Bellard, Chancellorsville, 1860s……….217
Figure 2.33 - Samuel Ferguson Jayne, “For This We Are Doctors,” 1864……….218
Figure 2.34 - Eastman Johnson, The Pension Claim Agent, 1867………...218
Figure 2.35 - John Vanderlyn, Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos, 1809-14………...219
Figure 2.36 - Louis Lang, The Invalid, 1870………...219
Figure 2.37 - Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1770………..220
Figure 2.38 - Julius Bien after Edward Stauch, Hospital Gangrene of an Arm Stump………..………...220
Figure 2.39 - William Bell (?), Case of Successful Secondary Amputation at the Right Hip Joint, 1867………...221
Figure 2.40 - “Henry A. Barnum”………...221
Figure 2.41 - Johnson and D’Utassy, Showing Stumps of Preceding Case, mid-1860s……….222
Figure 2.42 - Johnson and D’Utassy, Double Amputation of Thigh with Artificial Limbs, mid-1860s……….222
Figure 2.43 - Johnson and D’Utassy, Prosthetic Apparatus for a Case of Uterine Double Amputation of Both Thighs, mid-1860s……….……..223
Figure 2.44 - E. Sachse & Co, Washington. U.S. Patent Office, ca. 1855………...………223
Figure 2.45 - Theodore R. Davis, “Patent Office, Washington, D.C. —Examiners at Work,” Harper’s Weekly, 1869……….………...….224
Figure 2.46 - Dubois Parmelee, Improvement in Artificial Legs, Patent 37637, 1863………..…224
Figure 2.47 - A.A. Marks, A Treatise on Marks’ Patent Artificial Limbs with Rubber Hands and Feet, 1888………...……225
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Figure 2.49 – Capsar Buberl, Gate of the Invalids,
U.S. Pension Bureau………..………..226
Figure 3.1 - George Inness, The Old Veteran, ca. 1881……….….226
Figure 3.2 – George Inness, In The Gloaming, ca. 1881-1883………227
Figure 3.3 – George Inness, The Veteran’s Return (Landscape at Sundown; Close of Day), ca. 1881-1883……….….227
Figure 3.4 - George Inness, Goochland, West Virginia, 1884……….……228
Figure 3.5 - George Inness, Two Sisters in the Garden, 1882………..………...228
Figure 3.6 - George Inness, On the Farm, Milton, NY, 1882………..229
Figure 3.7 - George Inness, Olive Groves near Rome, 1870………...229
Figure 3.8 – George Inness, Tivoli, Italy, 1870………...230
Figure 3.9 - Mathew Brady, Wounded Trees at Gettysburg, ca. 1863………..………..…230
Figure 3.10 - “The Soldier’s Minstrels” in Secrets of the Great City, 1868……….…...231
Figure 3.11 - Eastman Johnson, The Tramp, 1876-1877……….231
Figure 3.12 - Winslow Homer, The Nooning, 1872………232
Figure 3.12 - Eastman Johnson, The Barefoot Boy, 1860……….……..232
Figure 3.14 - George Inness, The Coming Storm, 1878………..………233
Figure 3.15 - George Inness, October Noon, 1891………..233
Figure 3.16 - John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882………….….234
Figure 3.17 - George Inness, The Old Veteran (detail), ca. 1881………....…234
Figure 3.18 - Winslow Homer, Veteran in a New Field, 1865……….………...…235
Figure 3.19 - J.G. Chapman, The American Drawing Book, 1873……….….235
Figure 3.20 - George Inness, The Home of the Heron, 1893……….……..……236
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Figure 3.22 - Jules Bastien-Lepage, Pas Mèche (Doing Nothing),1882……….237
Figure 3.23 - Douglas Bly, Remarkable Inventions, 1870……….……….237
Figure 3.24 - Edouard Manet, The Ragpicker, 1865-1870………..238
Figure 3.25 - George Inness, Gray Day, Goochland, 1884……….…………238
Figure 3.26 - George Inness, Goochland, West Virginia (Detail), 1884……….239
Figure 3.27 - George Inness, Goochland, West Virginia (Detail), 1884……….239
Figure 3.28 - George Barnard, Hampton, VA., 1861-1865……...………..240
Figure 3.29 - John Reekie, A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Virginia, 1865………...……...240
Figure 3.30 - “A Distinction with Difference,” Punchinello, June 25, 1870………..241
Figure 3.31 - George Inness, Peace and Plenty, 1865………241
Figure 3.32 - “Return of Veteran Volunteers on Furlough,” Harper’s Weekly, January 23, 1864………..………..242
Figure 4.1 - Thomas Nast, “Compromise with the South,” Harper’s Weekly, September 3, 1864……….……...………..242
Figure 4.2 - Alfred Waud, A Street Contrast, ca. 1861-1865………..…243
Figure 4.3 - Currier and Ives, “Taking the Stump” or Stephen in Search of His Mother, ca. 1860……….………..243
Figure 4.4 - Rembrandt van Rijn, Beggar with a Wooden Leg, ca. 1630………....244
Figure 4.5 - The Ballad Singers, 1820……….244
Figure 4.6 - Pieter Jansz Quast, Fools, 1640-165…………..………..245
Figure 4.7 - The Conscription in Prospect—The Would-Be Exempts [A Manufactured Accident], May 1863………..….245
Figure 4.8 - Benjamin Franklin, Magna Britannia, Her Colonies Reduc’d, 1767………..246
Figure 4.9 - Edward Jones, A New Rule in Algebra. Five from Three and One Remains!!, ca. 1846………..………..246
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Figure 4.11 - Louis Mauer, Published by Currier and Ives, Abraham’s Dream!, 1864………..247
Figure 4.12 - American Anti-Slavery Society, Am I Not A Man and A Brother?,1837………..248
Figure 4.13 - The Degrading Compromise (Indiana), 1864………248
Figure 4.14 - The Degrading Compromise (Ohio), 1864………249
Figure 4.15 - Charles Godfrey and Henry Patrick Leland, Ye Book of Copperheads, Frontispiece, 1863………..249
Figure 4.16 - Charles Godfrey and Henry Patrick Leland, Ye Book of Copperheads, Page 2, 1863……….…..250
Figure 4.17 - Joseph E. Baker, How Free Ballot is Protected! 1864.……….250
Figure 4.18 - Currier and Ives, The Political “Siamese” Twins, ca. 1864………..251
Figure 4.19 - Thomas Nast, “Pardon Franchise,” Harper’s Weekly, August 5, 1865…………251
Figure 4.20 - Thomas Nast, “He Wants a Change too,” Harper’s Weekly, October 28, 1876………252
Figure 4.21 - Mathew Brady, The Scourged Back, 1863……….252
Figure 4.22 - Thomas Nast, “This is a White Man’s Government,” Harper’s Weekly, September 5, 1868………..253
Figure 4.23 - Thomas Waterman Wood, A Bit of War History, 1866……….253
Figure 4.24 - After Thomas Waterman Wood, “A Bit of War History,” Harper’s Weekly, May 4, 1867………....254
Figure 4.25 - Thomas Waterman Wood, His First Vote, 1868………254
Figure 4.26 - Thomas Waterman Wood, American Citizens (To the Polls),1867………...255
Figure 4.27 - Thomas Nast, “Andy’s Trip,” Harper’s Weekly, October 26, 1866………..255
Figure 4.28 - Thomas Nast, “Let us Clasp Hands over the Bloody Chasm,” Harper’s Weekly, October 19, 1872………..……..256
Figure 4.29 - Thomas Nast, “Bring the Thing Home,” Harper’s Weekly, July 13, 1872……...256
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Figure 4.31 - Thomas Nast, “Bringing the Thing Home; Or, Reasons Why the South Should Vote for Greeley,”
The Carolina Era, October 30, 1872……….……….……….257
Figure 4.32 - Thomas Nast, Greeley’s Amnesty Record, 1872………258
Figure 4.33 - Thomas Nast, “Who Are the Haters?” Harper’s Weekly, October 19, 1872…….258
Figure 4.34 - National Association of Hancock Veterans, The Hancock Veteran, October 1880……….…..259
Figure 4.35 - “How Hancock will (not) get the Soldier Vote,” Harper’s Weekly, August 28, 1880………..259
Figure 5.1 - Thomas Faris, Funeral Procession for Abraham Lincoln, New York, April 25, 1865……….………..260
Figure 5.2 - New York, Brdwy. Decoration Day Parade. The big building is Brooks Bros store cor. Bond St, 1875………….……….……260
Figure 5.3 - Raphael Tuck, Wreaths for the Living Conqueror, and Glory’s Meed for the Perished, 1908……….…..….261
Figure 5.4 - Adelaide R. Sawyer, The Empty Sleeve, 1866……….261
Figure 5.5 - Domenico Ghirlandaio, An Old Man and his Grandson, ca. 1490………..262
Figure 5.6 - Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child, ca. 1510……….262
Figure 5.7 - George Caleb Bingham, Order No. 11, 1865-1870……….………263
Figure 5.8 - Rees and Avery, The Empty Sleeve, ca. 1866………..263
Figure 5.9 - George Bosely, 1864………...……….264
Figure 5.10 - George P. Critcherson, The Empty Sleeve, 1870s………..………264
Figure 5.11 - E.E. Kellogg, The Empty Sleeve, 1907………..………….265
Figure 5.12 - Henry Alexander Ogden, “Decoration Day—The Veteran’s Right Arm,” Harper’s Weekly, June 5, 1886………..…………265
Figure 5.13 - Larkin G. Mead, Jr., The Returned Soldier, 1867……….………….266
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Figure 5.15 - F. Heppenheimer’s Sons, Decoration, 1890s……….267
Figure 5.16 - Frances Brundage, Nobly They Died in Freedom’s Name, 1908………...267
Figure 5.17 - Frances Brundage, The Bravest are the Tenderest. The Loving are the Daring, 1908……….…..……..268
Figure 5.18 - Frances Brundage, Honor the Living for Life’s Consecration. Give to their Pierced Hearts Love’s Healing Balm, 1908……….…………..268
Figure 5.19 - Raphael Tuck, They Fought Like Heroes, Long and Well, and then Like Heroes Died, 1908………..………..…269
Figure 5.20 - Frances Brundage, And Every Patriot’s Dust Shall Claim Affection’s Tenderest Tears, 1908………..…...……..269
Figure 5.21 - E. Nash, Decoration Day, 1910……….270
Figure 5.22 - E. Nash, Decoration Day (verso), 1910……….270
Figure 5.23 - E. Nash, Decoration Day, 1910……….271
Figure 5.24 - William Ludwell Sheppard, The Prison Camp, Bell Isle, Virginia, September 1863………....271
Figure 5.25 - William Ludwell Sheppard, Heroes Still, Life Scenes of a Confederate Soldier, ca. 1866……….…………..272
Figure 5.26 - William Ludwell Sheppard, In the Hospitals, Life Scenes of a Confederate Soldier, ca. 1866……….………..…………272
Figure 5.27 - William Ludwell Sheppard, In the Hospital, 1861, ca. 1900……….273
Figure 5.28 - William Ludwell Sheppard, Hollywood, Life Scenes of a Confederate Soldier, ca. 1866……….…..273
Figure 5.29 - William Ludwell Sheppard, “Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia—Decorating the Graves of the Rebel Soldiers,” Harper’s Weekly August 17, 1867……….…………..……274
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Figure 5.31 - William Ludwell Sheppard, “Decoration of the Graves of Confederate Soldiers, at Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Va., May 31st” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, June 26,
1869………..275
Figure 5.32 - James Henry Moser, “Georgia—Memorial Day in the South— The Observances at Atlanta April 26th,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, May 21, 1881………...275
Figure 5.33 - William Ludwell Sheppard, The Ambulance Committee, Life Scenes of a Confederate Soldier, ca. 1866……….……..276
Figure 5.34 - William Ludwell Sheppard, Talking Over Old Times, Life Scenes of a Confederate Soldier, ca. 1866……….………..276
Figure 5.35 - William Ludwell Sheppard, First Winter Not What It Is Cracked Up To Be, Life Scenes of a Confederate Soldier, ca. 1866…….…………...277
Figure 5.36 - William Ludwell Sheppard, The Camp Darkey, Life Scenes of a Confederate Soldier, ca. 1866……….…………..277
Figure 5.37 - Winslow Homer, Life in Camp, Part 1, 1864………278
Figure 5.38 - Winslow Homer, Life in Camp, Part II, 1864………278
Figure 5.39 - William Ludwell Sheppard, General Lee to the Rear! The Wilderness May 1864, Life Scenes of a Confederate Soldier, ca. 1866……….…...279
Figure 5.40 - Winslow Homer, In the Trenches, Life in Camp, 1864……….279
Figure 5.41 - William Ludwell Sheppard, In the Trenches, Life Scenes of a Confederate Soldier, ca. 1866………..….……280
Figure 5.42 - Van Doren Family Album………..280
Figure 5.43 - Van Doren Family Album………..281
Figure 5.44 - Van Doren Family Album………..…281
Figure 5.45 - J.H. Bufford, “The Invalid Corps,” 1863………...282
Figure 5.46 - “A Typical Negro,” Harper’s Weekly, June 4, 1863………..282
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Figure 5.48 - Garfield Thomas Haywood, “The Stand of the American
Sherriff,” Freeman, November 11, 1905 …… ………...………….…...283
Figure 5.49 - Henry J. Lewis, "The Race Problem Again," Freeman, June 2, 1889….………..284
Figure 5.50 - Garfield Thomas Haywood, “Memorial Day,” Freeman, May 25, 1907………..284
Figure 5.51 – “Coon, Coon, Coon” by Gene Jefferson and Leo Friedman, 1900……...………285
Figure 5.52 - “A Man Knows a Man,” Harper’s Weekly, April 22, 1865………...…....285
Figure 5.53 - The Blue and the Gray at Gettysburg, Assembly Tent, Gettysburg Celebration, Pennsylvania, 1913………..286
Figure 5.54 - Reunion of the Blue and the Gray at Evansville, IND, 1899……….286
Figure 5.55 - Fritz W. Guerin, Cuba Libre, ca. 1898………..………287
Figure 5.56 - Garfield Thomas Haywood, “Still Marching to the Grave,” Freeman, May 30, 1908………...…………..…………..287
Figure 5.57 - Garfield Thomas Haywood, “Reminiscence,” Freeman, May 29, 1909……...288
Figure 5.58 - F. Nash, To Day and Yesterday, ca. 1909………..…………288
Figure 5.59 - Archie Gunn, 1861-1917 The American Spirit, ca. 1917………..……….289
Figure 5.60 - Udo J. Keppler, “Memorial Day, 1899: Three Veterans under One Flag,” Puck, May 31, 1899………289
Figure 6.1 - Film still of Half Soldier and Angel Eyes, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 1966………...………290
Figure 6.2 - John Singer Sargent, Gassed, 1919………..290
Figure 6.3 - Norman Rockwell, The Long Shadow of Lincoln, 1945…….……….291
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INTRODUCTION
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of maimed soldiers in everyday life and the veteran’s uneasy gender position transforms the print into a lens on the unease and fluidity of American culture after the Civil War.
Homer’s iconic image stimulated my interest in this project. Venerated, emotional, and accessible, “Our Watering Places” seemed to offer an ideal lens on the ways in which images of disabled veterans functioned as vehicles for the collective commemoration of the Civil War. Yet Homer’s vision, while powerful, obscures and shields its viewers from the harsh, painful realities that veterans faced in the immediate aftermath of the war. While concealed, Americans knew what was inside Harry’s empty sleeve—the jagged, raw stump. Harper’s Weekly, a middle-class family illustrated periodical, spared its readers from reliving the violence of the surgical table by offering a tasteful depiction of war-related disability. Perhaps not surprisingly, the anonymously written article that accompanied the print tempered Homer’s radical gender reversal: “His eye is on the road and his voice guides her; so that, in reality, she is only his left hand and he, the husband, drives.”2 As the literary narrative shaped and suppressed the “threat” of disability, it negated Homer’s disconcerting visual commentary in favor of a semblance of antebellum stability embedded within the magazine’s text. Viewers could thus encounter and digest the foreignness of disabled veterans within carefully calibrated parameters. This effort at a carefully tempered interpretation points us to the difficulties that complicated the representation of the wounded veteran during and after the American Civil War—a conflict whose bloody and often incomprehensible violence transformed and shook the nation, causing representational and epistemological crises in the visual arts.3
3
American artists employed the veteran’s broken body as a vehicle for exploring the
overwhelming sense of loss and disillusionment experienced in the war's aftermath. In taking up the trauma and agony of the war, artists such as Homer worked out visual strategies that either concealed or revealed the aberrant body. As the complicated interpretation advanced by “Our Watering Places” suggests, the disabled veteran straddled a liminal and irresoluble position between war hero and social other, one that could be obfuscated or highlighted depending upon context. Oscillating between aestheticized ideals and the reality of affliction, visual
representations of disabled veterans uncover postwar Americans’ deep and otherwise unspoken anxieties about masculinity, identity, and nationhood. Contending with a subject that had the potential to deeply unsettle their viewers, American artists produced multivalent images that told a complicated narrative of corporeal difference as a result of warfare, one that was far from static and ultimately tied to how the Civil War was remembered, forgotten, interpreted, and
comprehended over time. Representations of battle-scarred survivors directly engaged the suffering that Americans had hoped to leave behind on the battlefields or in the newly created national cemeteries. At the same time, these “living relics” challenged artists to find ways to represent disfigurement for viewers allied to period ideals of normative bodily identity.4
4
photographers, and painters developed a new pictorial type that voiced their ideas, arguments, and anxieties about postwar multiracial America, and analyzed the mental and physical suffering of both their viewers and themselves.
These artistic responses to veterans’ visible and invisible wounds intervened in broader cultural dialogues about post-war pain. The war’s bloody aftermath forced Americans to confront and come to terms with death and disability, and the nation became, in the words of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, a “republic of suffering.”5 Americans viewed
horrific photographs of deceased, bloated bodies on the battlefield, or heard the sounds of amputee soldiers hobbling on their crutches; these and countless other sensory experiences produced an environment where pain and misery were inescapable. Suffering became the lens through which mid-nineteenth-century Americans viewed their past and future, and pain and trauma in turn became common themes in postbellum literature, philosophy, and even medicine. Poets such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville all addressed the
harrowing sights they witnessed on battlefields, hospitals, or the home front in evocative language that grappled with the “truth” of physical and psychological suffering.6 Yet suffering also had the potential to be cleansing and unifying in period reckonings; thus, for example Walt Whitman wrote, “curious as it may seem, the War, to me, proved Humanity, and proved
America.”7 Certain prose authors also attempted to articulate the war’s horrors in their writing, forging a relationship between literary realism and depictions of painful events; John William De Forest’s detailed depictions of corpse-ridden battlefields, for instance, enabled future generations to experience total immersion into the tragedy of conflict, while Ambrose Bierce’s scathingly brutal short stories delved unrestrainedly into the war’s carnage.8 As a reaction to the
5
William James, and John Dewey sought to alleviate the cultural pain through pragmatism and the rejection of any and all absolutes.9 Finally, science and medicine strove to cure physical and
mental ailments resulting from the war with advances in anesthesia and nerve studies.10 Pain and grief, in short, dominated the creative imagination, scientific understandings of the human body, and intellectual thought during and after the war.
This dissertation studies visual representations forged in this climate of rumination and experimentation. If they shared certain thematic concerns with period poets and philosophers, postwar artists also pursued their own objectives when they contended with the wounded
veteran. Most significantly, they cast this figure as a pictorial type, a cultural form that worked to translate the trauma, suffering, loss, and pain associated with the wounded veteran into visual terms. In so doing, they remade the veteran into a mechanism that could embody their fears and desires regarding the conditions of post-war America. Broken and disabled, the wounded veteran type resisted interpretive closure; as a liminal figure and ambiguous visual form, the pictorial veteran was ideologically malleable. Thus, for example, Democratic white Southern artists used the disabled veteran to decry the impoverished status of a post-war South, even as white
Northern artists employed the same type to demonstrate the heroism of Union veterans. The flexibility and fluidity of the wounded veteran type allowed artists of varying political or
6
Although seemingly ubiquitous in the visual arts, the disabled veteran type rarely
7
the viewer to consume Martin’s exposed body through a position of power, one ultimately intertwined with racial prejudice.
The Martin photograph recalls the slave daguerreotypes taken by J.T. Zealy for Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz a little over a decade earlier (Fig. 1.3). These photographs, here
exemplified by “Jem, Gullah, belonging to F.N. Green,” were meant to support Agassiz’s stance on polygenesis, or the notion that the human races derive from different origins.13 The resonance between Martin’s photograph and the Zealy image points us to a significant difficulty
confronting artists who would depict a wounded black Civil War veteran for the African
American community. Embedded within discourses of power and the gaze, detailed depictions of the injured black body could remind viewers of a slave past riddled with racial typologies and inequality.
The complicated status of many black soldiers within the Union army only raised the stakes of representation. Lewis Martin saw active duty during the war: he lost his limbs during the Battle of the Crater at Petersburg, Virginia, a disastrous attempt to take Richmond, the Confederate capital, which resulted in high casualties among black troops.14 Like other black soldiers who experienced battle, Martin faced the almost certain possibility of death if captured. Most of the free or fugitive African Americans who enlisted in the Union army, however, did not see this kind of action, and were instead conscripted into mundane forms of labor away from the battlefield. African American service was thus imbued with momentous implications, even as it was channeled into supporting or non-fighting roles. Facing this complex legacy, postwar
8
incomplete or partial bodies—bodies reminiscent of a dependent, enslaved past—were far less appealing in this context.15 Most African American artists (including, Edmonia Lewis, Robert S.
Duncanson, and Edward Bannister) avoided the disabled veteran type as a strategy to distance the veteran’s body from that of the enslaved. When African Americans were struggling for citizenship and equal rights, allusions to slavery detracted from the struggles at hand.
As a pictorial type, then, the disabled veteran was largely a white construct. Nevertheless, the figure fit uneasily within the racialized category of whiteness. Richard Dyer, Michael Eric Dyson, and other scholars have argued that whiteness has long been imagined in white culture to be a quality that is (in Dyer’s words) “in but not of the body;” white people as such have long been free to understand their identities as transcending mere embodiment.16 The wounded veteran refuses this possibility. The figure’s defining characteristic, after all, is the clear visual signification of physical trauma. If this quality was meant to conjure up the theme of heroic sacrifice, it also ensures that the viewer’s understanding of the veteran as a social type was inseparable from his embodiment, his status as a damaged or partial physical form. As we will see, artists developed various tactics in an effort to downplay or conceal the disabled veteran’s bodily difference. Some rendered disabled veterans on the margins of works; others pictured the veteran with prosthetics. In so doing, however, artists always maintained some reference to the veteran’s corporeal suffering—to do otherwise would be to court illegibility or diminish the figure’s visual impact. Despite the figure’s light skin tone, then, the disabled veteran carried persistent resonances of bodily otherness that challenged nineteenth-century constructs of normative whiteness.
Although I had hoped to find and write about images made by a variety of artists
9
Northern point of view due to the evidence available for study. At the start of the Civil War, New York City dominated the American art world, playing host to many of the nation’s most
important art schools and studios. In contrast, the art centers in the South—Charleston, New Orleans, Richmond—dissipated as patrons fled abroad, hindering their art markets.17 Such difficulties meant that few Southern artists exhibited outside of their local cities, or found room to comment upon the sectional conflict. The dearth of artistic output in the South continued during Reconstruction, when destruction, poverty, and trauma crippled artistic production. Consequently, the majority of artworks discussed in this dissertation adopt a white Northern perspective. At times, however, art of the white Confederate South and post-Civil War African Americans in the North will take the center stage in the narrative.
The geographical regions of North and South were of course broad and diverse during the mid and late nineteenth century; if the North had many Confederate sympathizers, the South had its share of anti-Confederate activists. And both North and South had African American
populations, freed and enslaved, whose perspectives would not always align with the dominant white cultural point of view. As such, it would be reductive and problematic to refer to such areas with sweeping categories of North and South without a definition of terms. Throughout my text, I make every effort to specify and further clarify Northern or Southern culture, whether black or white, free or slave, Confederate or Union.18
10
Frances Brundage swapped the bloody reality of amputation or wounding for sentimental depictions of disabled veterans with the able-bodied progeny of future generations. George Inness, by contrast, used the veteran’s marginal status to agitate for social justice, and Thomas Nast employed the plight of disabled former soldiers in order to advance his staunch Republican views during Reconstruction-era presidential elections. And still others offered tantalizing spectacles of corporeal disfigurement during sanctioned events, such as Decoration Day or military reunion parades, which allowed American civilians to openly gaze at and consume bodily difference through the frameworks of remembrance and reunification.
What did Americans make of the disabled men who, in the words of Ambrose Bierce, were “sentenced to life” while their brothers, sons, and fathers lay buried in the ground?19 In an effort to engage these questions while remaining focused on problems of visual representation, my dissertation examines the efforts artists took to depict or avoid veterans in American visual culture, exploring the unfolding perception of disability and trauma over time. Artists were a critical part of a constructive project to shape the narratives of the conflict, molding the raw and volatile emotions of post-war America to fit their political, economic, and visual ideologies. In so doing, they engaged in cultural mythmaking, carefully crafting idealized accounts of war-wounded disabled bodies. As we will see, artists perpetuated the notion of physical normality by visualizing maimed Civil War veterans as aberrant bodies existing outside the imagined
boundaries, othered figures who were nevertheless simultaneously heralded for their corporeal sacrifice to the nation.
The fifty years studied in this project traverse an especially fluid and volatile moment in American history, during which the mnemonic parameters of the legacy of the war were
11
the divisive conflict would be remembered and how the nation would move towards
reunification.20 The visual arts were a critical component in developing and sustaining such a
historical narrative, and one that concentrated on the interpretation of the survivors. But this period was more than a moment in memory-making. It also saw drastic shifts in the ways that Americans responded to corporeal difference. Indeed, this fifty-year period saw significant legal reforms that awarded wounded Union veterans and their families increased financial security, federal benefits, and other support systems, all of which dramatically reconstituted the social standing of disabled former soldiers.21 While the federal government never granted Confederate veterans pensions, individual former Confederate states offered veterans and widows pensions.22 Civilian responses to the increased federal assistance of disabled veterans and veterans’
ubiquitous societal presence inspired a wide range of feelings—from sympathy to
apprehension—that in turn impacted the cultural manifestations of the former soldiers in the visual arts.
This dissertation investigates the varied, conflicted, and deeply ambivalent interpretations that post-Civil War artists developed when confronted with the disabled veteran. By
12
or eulogizes it with tragedies like the ‘story-truth’ of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the lack of effectively empathetic conventions for representing disability remains painfully evident.23 The contemporary artist Dario Robleto presents a powerful visual manifestation of the dually damaged mind and body in his A Defeated Soldier Wishes to Walk His Daughter Down the Wedding Aisle (2004; Fig. 1.5). Created from a cast of a Civil War soldier’s hand-carved leg and a multitude of other materials of war, Robleto envisions the psychological impact of a veteran having to carve his own prosthetic in order to participate in a vaunted family ritual. In offering a new approach to the aesthetic theories of war-related disability, this dissertation illuminates particular desires, concerns, and hegemonic forces that continue to inform interpretations of contemporary veterans. While advancing new insights on the pictorial imaginings of trauma-inflicted bodies, this dissertation will be the first study to historicize the nineteenth-century American visual culture of war-induced disability, and will offer an alternative perspective to the canonical narratives of the American Civil War through representations of the survivors.
In addition to providing new perspectives on modern and contemporary wars, my
dissertation also opens up new ways to interpret better-known images of the Civil War. Timothy O’Sullivan’s oft-reproduced photograph, A Harvest of Death (Fig. 1.6), for example, functioned in its moment and the decades thereafter as an iconic representation of the sectional conflict and its bloody consequences. When we reconsider this picture in relation to wounded veteran imagery, however, it becomes clear that Harvest of Death offers a very particular interpretation of the effects and aftermath of war. By focusing entirely on the dead, O’Sullivan’s iconic
13
the battle, carried its violence with them, and made their own arguments about what it and the Civil War meant in the decades after the war. Attention to the visual culture of the disabled veteran similarly allows us to reconsider the implications of the innumerable common soldier monuments that appeared after the war (Fig. 1.7). In lionizing the able-bodied survivor as an epitome of masculine heroism, an icon of military service, and an emblem of the war’s memory, these monuments worked to exclude the disabled soldier from public dialogues about the war’s agents, impact, and legacy.
This dissertation examines images of the disabled veteran in an array of media aimed at a diverse set of audiences. By juxtaposing “high” and “low” media in my dissertation, I aim to obtain a fuller spectrum of the issues at stake when artists of various kinds represented the war-inflicted disabled body. This project approaches the disabled subject through a “critical history of images,” one with a span reaching beyond the canon of conventional artworks to include
popular, mass media, and visual culture situated within a specific socio-historical context.24 As we will see, relatively few fine artists were willing to take up the difficult figure of the disabled veteran. Linked by decades of aesthetic discourse to edification, spirituality, and the ideal, academic painting and sculpture were less amenable than other period cultural media to the representation of the traumatized veteran. As I will show, however, a few artists (including Eastman Johnson, Thomas Waterman Wood, and George Inness) successfully navigated the delimitations of their medium to address the veteran in paint.
14
photographers drew upon landscape paintings to question the morality of the war and oil painters used stock images from prints for visual economy in genre paintings. The disabled veteran became successful as a pictorial type strictly because of its malleable and polyvalent nature to distinct audiences. The artistic conventions of the disabled veteran type remained consistent— empty sleeve or pant leg, crutch, and military uniform—regardless of audience, but its meaning changed as it shifted across media and engaged new sets of viewers. While tracking the
movement of the veteran across media lines, this dissertation will examine the ways that fine and popular artists interpreted and reinterpreted the wounded figure for Northern and Southern, white and black, elite and common audiences.
My interest in using the visual object as a lens on the disabled Civil War veteran and his cultural context stems from visual culture studies. In fact, this project’s methodological
foundation is located at the intersection between visual culture studies and art history. In my approach, I do not grant privilege to one particular medium as evidence; rather I consider a wide range of images in different media as objects that offer equally rich and complicated revelations when brought together. By engaging in this egalitarian approach to visual evidence, I can elucidate the circulation and distribution of social and political ideologies. Additionally, my project is attentive to the ways that the specific qualities of different media shape these ideological constructs. Embedded within various media, such as paintings or cartoons, are conditions of possibility, or the limits and associations that structure and frame an artist’s consideration in selecting the medium. Throughout my dissertation, I attempt to be conscious of the artistic limitations of media. This dissertation aims, then, to explore the connections and divergences between disparate objects and socio-cultural issues. By exploring these
15
images,” or a broad field of interrelated pictorial works in a historically-specific arena.25 In addition to Burns, my work builds on several other scholars who have embraced visual culture approaches to art history. These include Michael Leja, whose work on deception in the late nineteenth century explores a period-specific set of concerns through a combination of high art and popular culture; Maurie McInnis, whose work on colonial art and material culture engages in a kind of visual archaeology, in which she traces the evolution of an image by reconstructing a network of ideas and objects; and Marcus Wood, whose scholarship on representations of slavery examines a collective experience across different media while remaining attuned to the capacities of each visual type.26
The absence of known paintings depicting amputee or disabled Civil War veterans can account for the subject’s relative invisibility in previous scholarship on the art and visual culture of the American Civil War. Furthermore, most contemporary writings on Civil War veterans in art conclude with the war’s immediate aftermath in 1865, and, as a result, have neglected a body of paintings (and other visual forms) produced in the decades that followed that year. Yet there are a number of art historians that consider individual artists, such as Winslow Homer or George Inness, who interpreted the war and its aftermath; and many others critically survey broad bodies of artworks made during or in response to the Civil War. These scholars include Eleanor Jones Harvey, who considers the postwar paintings of the American West as therapeutic pictures that attempt to cope with the war’s aftermath in the recent catalogue and exhibition The Civil War and American Art; Sarah Burns, who discusses the ubiquity of disabled veterans in the work of Lilly Martin Spencer; and Christopher Kent Wilson and Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., who have
established Winslow Homer’s vision of postwar life.27 My comparison of wounded bodies to the
16
of Megan Kate Nelson, who traces the complicated relationship between destruction and
construction through embodied ruins including bodies and the landscape.28 Perhaps most crucial
in establishing a basis for Civil War painting and its obscurity has been Steven Conn’s 2002 article, “Narrative Trauma and Civil War History Painting, or Why Are These Pictures So Terrible?”29 In his work, Conn argues that the devastating and traumatic experience of the war produced a “crisis of representation” in which the traditional models of narrative history painting were woefully inadequate for describing and visualizing a divisive and violent conflict.
While paintings of the Civil War and Reconstruction failed to capture public attention or garner success in the market, printed media, on the other hand, visualized the disabled veteran in abundance. In analyzing the artistic strategies for constructing and utilizing the disabled veteran type in printed media, this project builds on the work of Megan Kate Nelson, Frances Clarke, and Franny Nudelman, who have traced out the complicated duality of the maimed former soldiers’ bodies in the graphic arts.30 The conditions for circulating and consuming such images during the Civil War have been addressed to some extent in Joshua Brown’s seminal text on the ideological dynamics embedded in Frank Leslie’s Weekly.31 Art historians such as Jennifer Greenhill, Baird Jarman, and David Tatham have considered how specific artists, Thomas Nast and Winslow Homer, navigated cartoons, caricatures, and other graphic arts as sites of
experimentation for their cultural or political beliefs.32 And Alice Fahs’s study on the impact of Civil War literature in shaping cultural politics has offered a useful foundation and counterpoint to my exploration of wartime popular graphic arts.33
17
rich body of scholarship that probes the nature of war photography—a mass of work that has only cursorily considered the conflict’s aftermath and bodily destruction. Important studies include Anthony Lee’s work on Alexander Gardner, Jeff L. Rosenheim’s discussion of medical Civil War photographs by Dr. Reed Bontecou, and Alan Trachtenberg’s study on the difficulty of representing the reality of war and the battlefield through the photographic medium.34 My
account of photography’s relationship to medical discourse and its intertwining with the objectification of the body and the scrutinizing medical gaze draws on the work of Tanya Sheehan, who argues that medicine helped promote photography as an art form, and Shawn Michelle Smith, who has examined how the sciences of the nineteenth century and commercial portrait photography were “mutually constructive.”35 And Karen Halttunen’s study on the antebellum anxieties around deception and fraud were useful in my examination of veterans’ photographic uses of prosthetics and rehabilitation.36 The photographic medium is a complicated
tool in figuring disability, one that straddles a fine line between art, science, and documentary imperatives. This project expands our understanding of how photography captured the trauma of war not just through battlefields of the dead, but through the living bodies of the survivors, and, as a result, enables to us to obtain a fuller account of the impact of the medium and its
relationship to the Civil War.
18
the veteran type was ill-suited for monumental sculpture. And the medium’s focus on the human body rooted in neoclassical ideals of perfection made it challenging for sculptors to represent an imperfect or disabled figure. There were certain exceptions to the period’s general antipathy to sculptural imaginings of disabled veterans. Montgomery Meigs had sculptor Caspar Buberl envision a Parthenon-like frieze with wounded and disabled soldiers on a newly built pension office (Fig. 2.49). And John Rogers created two small-scale, private sculptures, Wounded to the Rear and Wounded Scout, which addressed the bodily destruction as a result of warfare (Figs. 1.8 and 1.9) Curiously, the Rogers groups were popular gifts among Civil War veterans.38 Yet the disabled veteran never obtained the same presence as in other media. His absence in public sculpture highlights the societal ambiguity of disabled veterans and the unresolved issues of nationhood and masculinity in their wounds.
By looking across media, this project seeks to recapture the shared ways that American artists constructed social identity through the disabled body. Much like sex, gender, race, and class, disability factors into the cultural construction of a social normative body. Operating on the principle that we see culture revolving around a central core that is defined by what it is not, this project explores the complicated ways that identity is constructed and maintained in
nineteenth-century American visual culture.39 Continuing the work of Rosemarie Garland
19
physical trauma, typically translated into an empty sleeve, peg leg, or use of a crutch. In all cases, artists sought to develop representational strategies that either highlighted or suppressed the trauma of the war. Disability came to serve as visual shorthand for engaging in postwar debates over identity, nationality, and masculinity.
20
disability was the African American veteran’s wounded body. Present within the disabled black veteran’s body is the intersectionality of race, gender, and corporeality, or the experience of multiple or interlocking oppressions in the presence of white hegemony.
Even as it upset antebellum gender and racial roles, the veteran’s disabled figure fractured national identity. Embedded within the body of the soldier are discourses of nationalism.42 Enlisted men fight to preserve and protect boundaries and ideologies that contribute—so the myth goes—to a national, glorious narrative. And when those bodies are mutilated or destroyed, it serves as a metaphor for the current status of the nation, recalling the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s argument that the physical body acts as a microcosm for the social body.43 Although the white Republican Northerners went into war to maintain the Union, the American Civil War ultimately forged a new nation.44 This was no longer the Union of 1776, but a nation purged of slavery and committed to free-labor capitalism. Yet as historian Caroline Janney has noted, reunion was not the same as reconciliation—the latter suggested forgiveness instead of a reluctant acceptance.45 For underneath the façade of political reunion lingered resentments stemming from the failure of Southern nationalism. The United States may have transformed into a whole, unified democratic country, but its sections remained divided, and as such, the shattered body of the veteran as an embodiment of irreparable brokenness had the potential to reveal the nation’s ongoing internal strife. This poignant symbol resisted the desire for closure and a mythic reconciliationist narrative.
21
years.47 In this charged climate, Americans embarked on another conflict—how to remember the Civil War. Memorial Day services, soldiers’ reunions, special publications, and issues of
illustrated weeklies devoted to the war were active attempts to shape the war’s memory and contributed to the persistence of the disabled veteran’s visual presence.48 Certainly, the
scholarship on the American Civil War as it relates to memory studies is extensive, and that body of work largely endeavors to tease out the distinctions between history and collective memory.49 My project is especially concerned with the “processual” changes of memory and how its evolution affected the visual strategies and ideologies that informed artists who utilized the figure of the disabled veteran.50 Considering textual representations of wounded soldiers
alongside popular images of the same subject, I address the body of the disabled veteran as a lieu de mémoire, or site of memory, which historian Pierre Nora has identified as a location where memories of the nation crystalize or fuse around cultural artifacts.51 Even as it recalled the war
for its viewers, I argue the veteran’s wounded and disabled body became a symbol, a lieu de mémoire, which would allow of a variance of mnemonic interpretations. Unlike the bronze, marble, or granite Civil War monument of the common soldier that graced the center of most towns, the veteran’s body was a living memorial that activated both the collective and personal past.
22
future and not the lingering ramifications of the sectional conflict. Third, I explore the politics of nationhood and reunification during wartime and postwar presidential elections. And finally, I examine the production of collective memory within the burgeoning “reminiscence industry,” a broad discourse that re-popularized the war and kept alive the debates around reunion.52
Unfolding between the onset of war and the culmination of its semicentennial, these cultural projects commented upon and shaped reactions to the memory of the conflict through the veteran’s disabled form. In what follows, I trace, and at times unveil, the broad visual
explorations that developed during these four pivotal cultural undertakings as artists attempted to traverse the anxiety around corporeal difference and contend with the irresoluble memories wounded bodies invoked.
My first chapter considers the medical illustrations, photographs, and material remains that the U.S. Army and its Medical Museum solicited as visual sites where art and trauma converged. Photographs and watercolor illustrations for the six-volume Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1870-1888) presented objectively rendered surgical cases that contrasted with the phenomenon of body parts on display, such as the leg of Union General Daniel Sickles. Inherent in these images and objects is a struggle to render the body, and by extension, the nation, in pain. Additionally, this chapter considers how artwork foregrounds the capacity of art and material objects to communicate complicated physical effects and abstract psychological experiences.
23
he repainted or covered several of the human figures with more conventional landscapes. Here I argue that Inness’s failed venture in painting disability and the ruins of the Civil War speaks to the limits of representation that guided attempts to visualize disability. In a period when the nation sought to suppress the trauma of the recent past, Inness’s paintings were uncomfortable reminders of the haunting physical and material remains of war.53
The third and fourth chapters primarily focus on the period extending from c.1885 through the semicentennial anniversary in 1915, an era in which the veteran was almost
incessantly represented in paint and print. Chapter three addresses the political nature of disabled bodies, considering the ways that wounded flesh and missing limbs were manipulated to convey a variety of nationalist arguments. This chapter offers comparative case studies of political cartoons for the presidential elections between 1864 and 1880 by Thomas Nast and other artists. My discussion of political bodies also explores the intimate connection between these
presidential elections and the struggles that disabled African American veterans faced in seeking enfranchisement and pensions.
The fourth and final chapter examines the early twentieth-century phenomenon of
24
lithographs, and celluloid buttons obtained a level of exposure and circulation for the disabled veteran had no precedent in the earlier postwar years.
The increase in visual exposure of the disabled Civil War veteran in the early twentieth century marks something of a transition point in how artists, predominantly white Northerners, dealt with war-related disability and memory. The semicentennial gave way to a vast array of organized reunion celebrations; these events (which included a grand reunion at Gettysburg) organized spectacles of commemoration that centered on the bodies of survivors. The centrality of war-inflicted disability during the semicentennial propelled a shift that would replace the previous century’s reticence to visualize corporeal difference. To be sure, artists still responded to war-induced physical disability with anxiety, but the figure of the disabled veteran became a more conventional stereotype in the American body politic. In the years following the
25
1 “The Empty Sleeve at Newport; Or, Why Edna Ackland Learned to Drive,” Harper’s Weekly (August 26, 1865): 534.
2 Ibid.
3 This has been argued by Steven Conn in “Narrative Trauma and Civil War History Painting, or Why Are These
Pictures So Terrible?” History and Theory 41:4 (December 2002): 17-42; and Eleanor Jones Harvey in The Civil War
and American Art (New Haven, CT: Smithsonian American Art Museum in association with Yale University Press,
2012), 5-15.
4 Civil War veterans were often referred to as “living relics” or “living monuments” in postwar writings. See Charles
L.Cummings and George Reed, The Great War Relic: A Poetical Description of the 6th Army Corps Campaign during
1863 (Harrisburg, PA: Meyers Printing and Publishing House, 1870); and “Pension Day," Neighbor's Home Mail: Ex
Soldiers' Reunion and National Campfire (Jan. 1875): 7, copy in New-York Historical Society Library, New York, N.Y.
The latter citation is from Brian Matthew Jordan, “‘Living Monuments’: Union Veteran Amputees and the Embodied Memory of the Civil War,” Civil War History 57:2 (June 2011): 121-152.
5 Frederick Law Olmsted, Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of Sick and Wounded from the
Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862 (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 115.
6 For example, Eliza Richards, “Death's Surprise, Stamped Visible": Emily Dickinson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Civil
War Photography,” 54:1 Amerikastudien / American Studies (2009): 13-33; Timothy Sweet, Traces of War: Poetry,
Photography, and the Crisis of the Union (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); and Richard Fuller,
From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
7 Walt Whitman, Memoranda during the War (Camden, NJ: Author’s Publication, 1875), 78.
8 Frances M. Clarke, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2011); and Joseph William De Forest, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession toLoyalty (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1867).
9 Louis Menard, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2001).
10 Valentine Mott, Pain and Anesthetics (Washington, DC: US Sanitary Commission, 1863); and Silas Weir Mitchell,
Sr., Injuries of Nerves and Their Consequences (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1872).
11 Lewis Martin, Company E 29th USCT, Pension Records, Invalid 102311 Certificate 61049, National Archives and
Records Administration.
12 A significant number of Bontecou’s photographs are privately held in the Burns Archive. See Stanley B. Burns,
M.D., Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Photography by Reed Bontecou (New York: Burns Archive Press, 2011).
13 For an in-depth analysis of the Zealy photographs and contemporary artistic responses to such images, see Brian
Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” American Art 9:2 (Summer 1995):
26
14 An excellent reference for another USCT regiment, the Massachusetts 54th and visual representation is Sarah
Greenough and Nancy Anderson, et al., Tell it with Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus
Saint-Gaudens' Shaw Memorial (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2013).
15 I found Nell Painter’s discussion of Sojourner Truth’s reluctance to be photographed with her disability helpful in
forming my argument regarding the absence of images of disabled African American veterans. See Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997), 185-199.
16 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997), 14. In addition, cultural theorist
Michael Eric Dyson has been useful in thinking through the societal construct of whiteness, especially “The Labor of Whiteness, the Whiteness of Labor, and the Perils of Whitewashing” and “Giving Whiteness a Black Eye.” Michael Eric Dyson, The Michael Eric DysonReader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004). See also David Batchelor, who shows how whiteness is not limited to skin color, rather whiteness is a culturally and politically determined position of looking that naturalizes and consolidates power. Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2000).
17 Eleanor Jones Harvey, The Civil War and American Art (New Haven, CT: Smithsonian American Art Museum in
association with Yale University Press, 2012), 3.
18 Some scholars have sought to address this discrepancy. For example, see Stephanie McCurry, Confederate
Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Ira
Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974).
19 Ambrose Bierce, San Francisco Examiner (December 11, 1887): 4.
20 The best study on the politics of Civil War memory remains David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in
American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), but the recent work by Caroline E. Janney,
Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2013) presents an addendum to Blight’s work, focusing on the distinction between reunion and reconciliation.
21 The Pension Act of 1862 increased pension rates and allowed those who had served in the Union military or navy
since March 4, 1861 as eligible for a pension as well as their widows dependents. Throughout the next two decades Congress modified the pension laws to increase eligibility and rates. The Arrears Act of 1879 which increased the number of eligible veterans for pensions and granted a lump sum in pension back payments. But it was the 1890 Dependent and Disability Pension Act that dramatically altered the pension process. Veterans could claim disability status for non-military injuries and the law eased restrictions on widows and dependents obtaining pensions. An excellent overview of the various stages of Civil War pension reform is Peter David Blanck and Michael Millender’s “Before Disability Civil Rights: Civil War Pensions and the Politics of Disability in America,”
Alabama Law Review 52:1 (Fall 2000):1-50.
22 Alabama and North Carolina were the first former Confederate states to begin offering pensions to Confederate
veterans in 1867. For additional information, see Jeffery E. Vogel, “Confederate Veterans and the Southern Responses to Federal Civil War Pensions,” Civil War History 51:1 (March 2005): 67-93.
23 Nina Berman’s photograph of Marine Sgt. Ty Ziegel and Renee Kline appeared on the cover of People Magazine
on November 13, 2006.
24 John Davis, “The End of the American Century: Current Scholarship on the Art of the United States,” The Art
Bulletin 85:3 (September 2003): 544-80; and Patricia Johnston, “Introduction: A Critical Overview of Visual Culture
